Description

Background

IPTV offers a new range of TV services. This includes interactive services which involve the TV watcher with the programs, or enable mutual communication between watchers. The TNO-developed service ConnecTV is an example of an interactive TV service, where multiple users are "watching apart together" the same content at different TV sets, while communicating with each other using text, speech and/or video communication.

Synchronicity is a problem, as the "watching apart together" experience is already spoiled if the playout time differs less than a second, whereas delay differences of multiple seconds are likely to occur. TNO has a working ConnecTV implementation. However, user perception of synchronization errors has never been investigated, nor is it known what synchronization performance realistic implementations can achieve.

Project description

The graduate student should design and perform user tests to determine requirements on synchronicity, both in static (users watching apart together) and dynamic (users joining or leaving the group) cases.

Next, the graduate student should make an analysis of realistic network scenarios to design synchronization algorithms and to validate their performance, which should be verified with simulations.

We are looking for:

A graduate student with a beta background (Electronic Engineering, Computer Science or similar). Feeling for perception, user test design, performance analysis and - simulation is required. Experience with technical implementations of video technologies are desired, but not essential.

TNO is offering:

An interesting external assignment (at TNO), carried out in a stimulating environment, possibly resulting in a publication.